Abstract

Current mobile network infrastructure has a hard time keeping up with the constant content demand by an increasing number of smart devices, in terms of both bandwidth and cost. At the same time, the advent of devices with relatively high resources (computing, communications, caching) allows offloading computation, control, cache, and communication near users, as in edge or fog networking. If we consider the caching resource, the basic challenges are: (i) How and who can form fogs for local content caching? (ii) How is interacting with the fog done for efficient content caching and retrieval? To address these, we leverage information-centric networking to propose IS-Fog, a social-aware fog network where the content is the first class citizen. We first classify a device's eligibility to provide content using novel content-based centrality. At the same time, we incentivize users to self-organize and share their devices' resources and cache in the fog. We then propose social-aware content caching and a distribution scheme to model fog interactions allowing nodes to collaboratively cache content locally. We evaluate IS-Fog using realistic mobility traces of 2986 nodes. Results show that IS-Fog is a more scalable and efficient content caching and distribution approach compared to existing schemes.